The present invention relates to a cooking apparatus and method. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method for cooking a food item, and a cooking apparatus for use with the cooking method.
Various types of ovens for cooking food items are known. With certain categories of ovens operatives are required to manually interact with oven controls in order provide the necessary input to the oven so that it will cook a food item as is required. Such ovens can also include pre-programmed or stored cooking processes for various food items so that to cook a food item an operative needs to manually select an appropriate cooking process based on the type of food item to be cooked.
Other categories of oven are adapted to receive the required input through the use of barcodes or tags attached to a food item, the bar code or tag encoding or storing cooking data for the food item. These ovens typically comprise or are coupled to a bar code or tag reader which is used to receive and transmit the cooking data encoded in the barcode to a controller, the controller in turn controlling heating times and output levels of the oven based on the cooking data so that the cooking of food is carried out.
However, in commercial environments, including retail outlets, the cooking of food items based on such processing suffers from a number of drawbacks. One major problem is a lack of control over the re-use of cooking data, wherein it is common place for operatives to use barcodes or tags on the packaging of one food item, such as a sausage roll, to activate a cooking process for a second often quite different food item, such as a raw chicken pie. Clearly cooking data for heating a pre-cooked sausage roll is very different from cooking data needed for activating a cooking process for a raw chicken pie, both in terms of the required heating time and output levels needed. The re-use of such cooking data may occur for a number of reasons, including that, and using the above example, the raw chicken pie was never intended to be cooked by an operative using the oven, or that the barcode or tag on the chicken pie has been damaged or defaced, removed or even inadvertently not affixed to the food packaging during the initial product preparations. It will be appreciated that when relying on predefined cooking processes to cook a food item the quality of any food product which has not been cooked precisely according to the correct cooking data suited to the product will clearly be inferior, and will quite often lead to serious cases of food poisoning.
Additional problems with the prior art cooking apparatuses resides in their inherent inability to deal with the recall and traceability of food items. Product recall is necessary when a food item is inadvertently contaminated during preparation or when ingredients used in the preparations are somehow contaminated.
It would thus be desirable for a cooking method and cooking apparatus which will go someway towards overcoming the above problems, and/or which will provide the public and/or industry with a useful alternative.